


When Eyes Meet Eyes

by ficlicious



Category: Iron Man - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate universe - canon divergent, M/M, Mostly Fluff, Not Canon Compliant, Pre-Avengers 2012, Soul Meets Soul When Eyes Meet Eyes, Winteriron Fic Exchange Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-18 22:13:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13109568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficlicious/pseuds/ficlicious
Summary: The memory of an incomplete soul-meeting, the feeling of Yinsen slipping away to a dark place Tony dared not follow, haunts Tony for months.Years. It informs his decisions. It drives his actions. It reminds him thattime is unreliable. It teaches him thata wasted life is the worst sin he could ever commit.Ana and Edwin Jarvis might be his ideal gold-standard couple, but Ho Yinsen’s sad, broken life is his cautionary tale.





	When Eyes Meet Eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kenshincha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenshincha/gifts).



> Festive holidays, kenshincha. Hope you enjoy. :)
> 
> Title and general concept gleefully lifted from ElfQuest's concept of soulbonds and relationships.

He's thirty-seven before he even comes close to having a soulmate experience.

At ten years old, he wanted nothing more than to have the kind of fairy tale story Ana and Edwin Jarvis enjoyed. He wouldn't realize until long after both their deaths that _fairy_ _tale_  had been the operative word in all Miss Ana's romantic tales of their courtship and marriage, but he still held them as the gold standard to which all his other relationships fail to approach. By the time he's actively looking for his soulmate, he's built the Jarvises up in his mind, and no one, certainly not _him_ with his inherited alcoholism and his inherited assholery, can possibly live up to the ideal.

But he feels the pull begin as he looks into the eyes of Ho Yinsen as he dies, as he demands with his last breath that Tony _stop wasting his life,_  and it changes Tony's whole world, instantly and completely and irrevocably.

The memory of an incomplete soul-meeting, the feeling of Yinsen slipping away to a dark place Tony dared not follow, haunts Tony for months. _Years_. It informs his decisions. It drives his actions. It reminds him that _time is unreliable_. It teaches him that _a wasted life is the worst sin he could ever commit._

Ana and Edwin Jarvis might be his ideal gold-standard couple, but Ho Yinsen's sad, broken life is his cautionary tale.

\----

He returns from Afghanistan a different man, though it takes the world an embarrassingly long time to realize it. In his more forgiving moments, he knows he can't really blame the world for disbelieving his change of heart. He's pretty sure they're still waiting for proof he even has one. In his less forgiving moments, he sits in the dark and stares long and hard at his last bottle of whiskey. Spared the eviction its siblings and neighbours suffered as soon as he had the courage to open the cupboards and start exorcising the spirits via the sink and its plumbing, the whiskey remains untouched, unopened, and Tony tests himself against it, against the craving for oblivion churning his stomach to nauseated lurching.

Tests his own resolve against the last words of a man bound for true oblivion. And when he remembers that yawning _nothing_ opening into endlessness beneath Yinsen's falling body, it's easier to put the bottle back in the cupboard for the next dark day he'll face, because limbo in a bottle is a waste of his precious fucking time.

\---

Deep down, he'd always known Obie had had partners in his dirty dealing. He'd let himself be convinced otherwise, because he'd won, dammit. He'd saved the day, stopped the bad guy. (Maybe even rescued the damsel. Coulson counted as a damsel, right? He knew for sure Pepper didn't; she was quite clear on that subject the last time he'd broached it. He'd saved Coulson. He was ninety-nine...ninety-two...okay, _nine_ percent sure about that. He was clearly the most qualified to be the damsel.) He figured, okay, still paying for a lot of sins, but he could catch a break now, right?

The sniper's bullet whining off the brickwork just to the left of his head, and the subsequent impact of Happy's body knocking the wind out of him as his bodyguard takes him with verve and enthusiasm to the floor, however, puts paid to that notion.

He sees stars, briefly, as his head smacks the ground -- thankfully cushioned by Happy's suddenly-outthrust hand instead of bouncing directly off the concrete; he's very very smart, but he'd rather not lose brain cells he doesn't need to lose these days -- and he isn't sure if the spots swimming in his field of view are from the starburst of pain in his head, or the fact that Happy is passively crushing his chest as he tries to cover him from the next, thus-far-theoretical sniper round and he's in early hypoxia because he can't get a proper breath.

The crowd's reaction finally kicks in on the usual time-delay, and the panicked screaming begins the second someone realizes that, _ha ha, that asshole Tony_ is not actually doing any publicity stunts today, thank you very much, and there really is a real person really shooting at them. The tiresomely predictable stampede to exit the scene follows shortly after.

Tiresome or not, Happy gets the fuck _off_ Tony when the milling, swarming crowd gives him the cover to do so. Tony gasps like a dying fish for oxygen, and waves him off as he staggers to his feet.

"I'm going to send you back to bodyguard school so you can learn how to fall on someone without smothering them to death," he grouses, slapping at the hopelessly dirt-streaked spots on the legs of his slacks. "Clearly, a class you skipped the first time around."

"Sorry boss," Happy says with breathless, professional efficiency, and hustles him into the slightly-more-than-dubious protective shelter of an alcove. "It was the lesser of two evils. If I smothered you, we've still got a chance of reviving you. Shooter gets you in the head, ain't no coming back from that."

Well. When he puts it like _that_...

"What's the game plan, boss?" Happy glances around again, crowds a little closer, though Tony thinks it's for his own comfort, not because there's a spot he left uncovered with his bulk between Tony and his would-be assassin. "I assume I'm not getting you out of here like a normal VIP would want."

At long last, his staff is finally trained to anticipate his wishes and whims. Praise be to JARVIS. "You assume correctly. Do I assume correctly that I have armour on hand?"

"I already keyed in the code on the fob. What do you want me doing?"

Holy shit, if Happy doesn't knock off the employee of the year shtick, Tony's going to have to give him a very generous raise just to express the depth of his gratitude at the _lack of arguments._  "Well, if I know my law enforcement protocols, and I don't, I'm guessing the cops will be on site soon." He sheds his suit jacket, peels off the dress shirt too. Throws several thousand dollars worth of sleek, fancy clothes into the dirt and slaps his homing bracelets over his wrists to prep for the armor's arrival. "Get civilians out first. If the sniper wants something to shoot at, I'll give him something bright and shiny to shoot at. It'll keep his attention off the little people, at least."

He catches a glint of red and gold from the sky, prepares himself to leap out of his semi-sheltered position and let the new model pick him up on the way. His timing could be better. Okay, it _sucks_. He's late on the leap, and the armour rattles his head pretty good as it slams into place around him, but he's fought in worse conditions. He can fight with the minor inconvenience of his ears ringing like a bell.

With the HUD tracking the movements of everything larger than a housefly, Tony sees the next incoming bullet with plenty of time to roll out of its way. That's how he'll tell the story after he has time to polish it a little, anyway. It's a hell of a lot more dignified than 'only saw it by chance, and it scratched the paint job in a very sensitive location I'd rather not mention'.

It's also by chance that he catches the glint of daylight on something far more polished and reflective than a dull grey concrete wall, and finds the assassin tucked into an improbably tiny sniper's nest that he's not even sure _gravity_ has noticed, because there's no other humanly possible way he could cling to the side of the building like that.

He hard-burns his boot jets, racing the clock to reach the sniper before he can get another shot off. The armor's impact-resistant, but Tony's not sure how high his ballistic rating really goes; from what he can see of the hardware pointed in his direction, field-testing the penetration point of the new alloy blend is not something he currently wants to do while leading with his skull.

His opponent is wickedly fast, faster than Tony can more than half believe he saw with his own two eyes. In the space of one blink and the next, he's out of the _how the hell did he even fit in there_ perch and scaling the building with his rifle now slung across his chest. Tony knows if he manages to get to the roof, he's going to disappear, bide his time until he can take another, more successful crack at killing him, and Tony can't let that happen.

He refuses, after everything he's been through, to get taken out by something as commonplace and fucking _boring_ as a bullet.

He's practically on top of the guy before he realizes that the shiny silver armour encasing his left arm isn't actually armour. It's _his arm,_ and the presence of cybernetic enhancements throws his threat assessments and game-theorying straight out the fucking window, because he didn't account for them. He tries to compensate, too late, too thrown off-balance by the discovery, and ends up hurled across the rooftop, his own momentum his worst enemy as he breaks a chimney with his ass and lands noisily in a pile of limbs and bruises and chunks of brick on the roof below it.

 _Get up,_ he tells himself, when himself remarks dazedly that it'd be nice to lie there for awhile until the world stopped blurring and spinning around them. _Get up before he's gone for good._

He needn't have worried. He isn't even on his feet when Tall, Dark and Psychotic bounds over the ruins of the chimney like gravity doesn't just ignore him, it doesn't realize he actually exists at all, and comes straight at him like he's forgotten the rifle on his back and plans on killing Tony with just his bare hands.

This model of armour was never made for fist-fighting -- that's what the Brawler class design, still awaiting final production edits before rolling out onto his personal assembly line, is for -- but Tony gives it his best try anyway, pulling on muscle memory of long hours drilling in the ring with Happy to weave and bob and dance and jab in armour not meant to do any of those things.

He gets in a few solid blows, of which he can be and bet-your-ass-damned-right _is_ proud of, including one solid hit that sends the assassin's blackout goggles flying from his face. He catches one glimpse of cold, furious blue eyes before the assassin's return blow, full-powered with a metal fist, strikes him in the temple. Even through space-grade titanium, his teeth rattle in their sockets and the side of his helm dents inward so intolerably tight to his skull he has to reel backwards and claw at the edges until he can pull it off his throbbing head.

He hurls the useless helmet directly at the assassin, forcing him to raise both arms across his face to protect himself, which buys Tony a precious second to come up with a plan. One that, preferably, doesn't involve him getting his squishier-than-titanium skull caved in by Terminator's cyberarm.

Time's up before he comes up with one; the assassin's one and a half bounds of his stupidly long legs away. Tony's got nothing but his default _fight like you don't wanna die,_ so he throws caution to the wind and goes with that. He screams defiance, mostly so he doesn't scream terror, and throws himself face-first towards the assassin to fight him to the death.

And stops dead, as Edgelord Barbie stops dead, inches apart, arms raised for punches and strikes, staring at each other. And Tony's breath catches when he feels the familiar sensation of the pull, vibrant and bright now, not the weak and wan thing with Yinsen's dying moments, sweep over him.

The images and memories pour through his mind, alien and hauntingly familiar at the same time, impossible and undeniable, and when he opens his eyes again, unsure of when he closed them, he knows with perfect confidence who his soul just introduced itself to.

"Tony Stark," the assassin says, wide-eyed, haunted, and frightened.

He has to clear his throat before he can reply. "Bucky Barnes."

Neither of them move for a moment, not even to break their renewed eye contact. Then Bucky makes an animal sound, pain and misery, and before Tony can stop him, has leapt off the side of the building and vanished somewhere in the warren of alleyways below.

\----

Tony spends days, weeks, sorting through the info dump downloaded into his brain, trying to find a single thing about _any_ of this situation that makes any kind of sense. It distracts him from work, it makes him sharp and snide and quite frankly, if he's being honest, an unbearable asshole to those around him.

He doesn't explain why he's cranky. He doesn't know how to begin explaining why.

Loki invades with an army of aliens and Tony suits up for the good of the world, edgy and out of sorts because Captain America features in so many of the memories he was gifted -- cursed -- with, but isn't anything like the guy Bucky remembered. He tries to forget, to lose himself in the heat of battle. He flies down the gullet of a giant space whale, but even that isn't enough to displace the depressingly omnipresent thought that maybe he doesn't get to have an Ana and Edwin Jarvis relationship after all.

That maybe he doesn't _deserve_ one.

It isn't until he's suffocating out somewhere in the middle of a fuck-knows-how-distant part of the galaxy that it finally, _finally_ , occurs to him that maybe _he_ hadn't been the reason Bucky ran. His last thought as his consciousness fades into silent, cold black, is that he's a stupid fucking idiot for dying like this, no matter how interesting a death it is.

\----

He wakes up a different man, and he has a sneaking suspicion he's been a different man for awhile now, but it's taken him an embarrassingly long time to figure it out.

He doesn't know if the world likes the new him, but he also doesn't think he really cares what the world thinks of him. There's only one person whose opinion matters to him right now, and Tony's a little surprised to discover he's actually perfectly fine waiting until that person feels like sharing that opinion.

It isn't all that long, all things considered, when Tony looks up from the blueprints of the repair work he's doing on the penthouse suite the Hulk thoroughly trashed with Loki, one of the last things on his to do list in cleaning up his part of Manhattan, and finds Bucky standing uncertainly in the doorway, a backpack over his shoulder and civilian clothing not doing a hell of a lot to hide his arm more than superficially.

"Bucky Barnes," he says with a smile, and puts down the carpenter's pencil before he tries to tuck it behind his ear and loses it again.

Bucky's return smile is hesitant, but manages to reach his eyes. "Tony Stark." A long pause. "Am I... welcome here?"

"You're breaking my heart if you think I'd turn you away, honeybunch," Tony replies, hovers for a moment, and then takes a couple of faltering steps towards him. "Had some time to think it over?"

The full force of his grin is fucking _devastating_ , in no small part because it's so bright and sudden, and Tony's momentarily dazzled by it. "Your friend Yinsen had a good point. A lot of my life's been wasted. Figured maybe... it didn't have to be anymore. So yeah. Thought it over. Here I am." The smallest of hesitations. "That okay with you?"

"Yeah," Tony breathes, closes the distance and he's not sure who reaches for who first, but he's positive it doesn't really matter in the end. All that matters is the warmth sliding over him, contentment suffusing through him, as Bucky's arms settle over his back and close tight.


End file.
